Push for artisan engineering industry
Arku Jasmine
The local artisanal engineering industry in the country is set to witness a major revolution in modern automobile technology.
This followed a historic collaboration between the Suame Magazine Industrial Development Organisation (SMIDO) and the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology (KNUST) to establish a unit under the College of Engineering of the university for the research, training and certification of artisan engineers in modern automobile engineering to support the Suame Magazine Automatics Technical Institute (SMATI) Project.
SMATI is a model artisan technical institutional centre of excellence initiated by SMIDO to ensure the establishment and accreditation of a first-of-its-kind institutional training centre for skills formation and upgrading for artisan engineers in the country and the West African sub-region.
The partnership was successfully brokered upon the signing of a memorandum of understanding (MOU) by the two institutions recently.
The Vice-Chancellor of KNUST, Professor William Otoo Ellis, signed on behalf of the university, while Mr Sarpong Boateng, President of SMIDO, signed on behalf of the artisans of Suame Magazine and other artisan clusters in the country.
Disclosing this to the Daily Graphic in Kumasi yesterday, the consultant to SMIDO, Mr Nyaaba-Aweeba Azongo said, “The historic partnership marked a significant milestone in our quest to arrest the imminent collapse of the artisanal engineering industry due to the conflict between current vehicular repair technology which is largely computer-based, and the existing manual vehicular repair skills which is phasing out with new models of vehicles replacing the old models.”
According to Mr Azongo, a functional SMATI driven by the KNUST College of Engineering and other technical partners in Ghana and abroad would reform the traditional apprenticeship system of training artisan engineers.
The initiative, the consultant indicated, was to build an industry-academia-government tripartite model to drive Suame Magazine’s industrialisation agenda and also build a local content model for the integration of Suame Magazine into the mining, oil and gas industry for a more equity-based local content enterprise, given the labour-intensive character and ease of entry into the industry.
By Kwame Asare Boadu/Daily Graphic/Ghana
This followed a historic collaboration between the Suame Magazine Industrial Development Organisation (SMIDO) and the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology (KNUST) to establish a unit under the College of Engineering of the university for the research, training and certification of artisan engineers in modern automobile engineering to support the Suame Magazine Automatics Technical Institute (SMATI) Project.
SMATI is a model artisan technical institutional centre of excellence initiated by SMIDO to ensure the establishment and accreditation of a first-of-its-kind institutional training centre for skills formation and upgrading for artisan engineers in the country and the West African sub-region.
The partnership was successfully brokered upon the signing of a memorandum of understanding (MOU) by the two institutions recently.
The Vice-Chancellor of KNUST, Professor William Otoo Ellis, signed on behalf of the university, while Mr Sarpong Boateng, President of SMIDO, signed on behalf of the artisans of Suame Magazine and other artisan clusters in the country.
Disclosing this to the Daily Graphic in Kumasi yesterday, the consultant to SMIDO, Mr Nyaaba-Aweeba Azongo said, “The historic partnership marked a significant milestone in our quest to arrest the imminent collapse of the artisanal engineering industry due to the conflict between current vehicular repair technology which is largely computer-based, and the existing manual vehicular repair skills which is phasing out with new models of vehicles replacing the old models.”
According to Mr Azongo, a functional SMATI driven by the KNUST College of Engineering and other technical partners in Ghana and abroad would reform the traditional apprenticeship system of training artisan engineers.
The initiative, the consultant indicated, was to build an industry-academia-government tripartite model to drive Suame Magazine’s industrialisation agenda and also build a local content model for the integration of Suame Magazine into the mining, oil and gas industry for a more equity-based local content enterprise, given the labour-intensive character and ease of entry into the industry.
By Kwame Asare Boadu/Daily Graphic/Ghana